1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to computer systems and specifically to a computer on a card with a remote human interface.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many commercial businesses and enterprises make extensive use of personal computers (PCs) in their daily operations. Typically, each user of a personal computer in the enterprise has a networked PC at their desk or work area. As the number of networked computer systems utilized in an enterprise increases, the management of such resources becomes increasingly complex and expensive. Some of the manageability issues involved in maintaining a large number of networked computer systems include ease of installation and deployment, the topology and physical logistics of the network, asset management, scalability (the cost and effort involved in increasing the number of units), troubleshooting network or unit problems, support costs, software tracking and management, as well as the simple issue of physical space, be it floor space or room on the desktop. In addition, there are security issues regarding physical assets, data protection, and software control, as well as computer virus issues. In many business establishments, such as call centers, there is no need for the user to install software on his/her unit, and in fact, management may specifically forbid employees from doing so. However, the standard personal computer configuration inherently provides the user this ability because the system is typically located with the user, and includes a floppy drive, CDROM, and one or more hard drives. Ensuring that unauthorized software is not installed on any of the machines in the network involves periodically personally auditing the software contents of each machine, at substantial cost in time and effort.
Many of these issues may be addressed by centralizing the locations of the personal computers, such as by installing multiple PCs into a central frame or cabinet. Prior art systems have generally been applied to servers and have focused on installing a standard PC into a sliding cabinet, where the term “standard PC” refers to a motherboard with extension slots, floppy drives, hard drives, CD drive, and a general open architecture supporting most standard expansion cards.
Two variations of this approach are typical. The first is to stand a standard PC motherboard on its edge to create a taller, thinner PC. All connections are on a rear panel and any ancillary boards plug in perpendicular to the motherboard. The second variation consists of plugging the PC motherboard into a back plane (either vertical or horizontal) which also receives any ancillary cards required. Both of these configurations lend themselves to a slide-drawer approach to packaging. However, there are numerous disadvantages with these approaches due to the fact that various compromises in size and feature set have been made to accommodate a wide assortment of feature addition cards. Such disadvantages include a higher product cost and a large physical size for each unit. In addition, the terminations and connections at the back of each unit are awkward to use—in the case of the first approach the terminations are on the motherboard, requiring the removal of all connectors before removing the board from its slide drawer case; in the case of the back plane based system the edge connections for each card have a high number of connections which creates a connection environment which is both fragile and difficult to administer. Finally, the power supply for the computers is typically part of the drawer holding cabinet and is not located on the slide drawer, which means that there is a single point of failure for the entire system, i.e., if the power supply fails, all the computers fail.
If the computer systems are not used as servers, there is the additional issue of coupling each PC's human interface (HI) components to the computers in the central cabinet. Such components may include a keyboard, pointing device, such as a mouse or trackball, display device, such as a monitor, or any other human interface device. Locating each unit's HI at a remote location may be problematic due to distance limitations, such as those associated with the Universal Serial Bus (USB) protocol, and complex cabling requirements for transmission of video and computer peripheral signals. Current prior art systems which utilize commonly located computing systems have not provided any mechanism or logic on the computing system which enables the human interface associated with the computing system to be located at a remote location.
Therefore, an improved system is desired for configuring a computer system with the capability of communicating with a remote human interface.